"All the festivals will cease, but the days of Purim will not cease (Midrash Mishlei, 9)." This rather surprising teaching about Purim is based on a verse towards the end of the megillah (scroll) of Esther. At the end of the story, we read that the Jewish people took upon themselves the commitment "...that these days of Purim shall not disappear from among the Jews, nor the memory of them perish from their descendants (Esther 9:28)." Apparently, some of our teachers read this verse ultra-literally. In the time of the messiah, all the other holy days will cease to be observed but Purim will always be celebrated.
Given this unexpected elevation of a minor holiday, we have to ask, "Why Purim?" We are not alone in asking this question. Commentators have wrestled with it throughout our history. In his seminal book about Jewish religious observance, Rabbi Isaac Klein suggests: "The festival of Purim offers Jews a powerful lesson, teaching them not to despair even when dangers are most threatening and persecution most cruel. Its festivities cheered the Jew in his darkest moments and assured him that deliverance was at hand ('A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice,' pg. 240)."
I think there's even more. Purim invites us to look directly at the fragility, the unpredictability, the terrible darkness and madness that are also part of God's world and, nevertheless, to laugh and sing and rejoice. Paradoxically, by looking into that darkness and laughing, we silence it so that its name cannot even be heard anymore. We drown out the noise of evil with music, joy, laughter and loving community. Perhaps, this celebration is just a kind of manic denial that does nothing at all to change horrible realities. But perhaps, it is a powerful form of spiritual resistance to evil--a proclamation of stubborn, unrelenting, unyielding hope.
I doubt that laughter, joy, music and love have the power to prevent terrible things from happening. But they do, sometimes, have the miraculous capacity to enable us to survive and transcend suffering. They remind us that the world is not all darkness and that we need not, we ought not surrender to people who work evil the power to name our experience, the right to define what our lives mean.
It's possible that Purim is just a kind of delirious denial of reality--a raucous fairytale that we tell to convince ourselves (against all the evidence) of the possibility of happy endings. Our lives are so very fragile after all, so exposed to harsh, destructive realities and selfish, thoughtless, brutal people. But perhaps, Purim is a revelation of the redemption that can come from remembering to laugh and sing and love not in order to deny the uncertainty and suffering but to help us survive and heal and affirm life, even in the face of all that brokenness. Seems like a lesson worth remembering--forever.
-Rabbi Jonathan Kraus
